Here is how you can create and print your own personalized birthday party invitations in Word from a list of your friends compiled in Excel.

First, create your friends list in Microsoft Excel. It does not need to be anything fancy, just a straight list of names, but make sure you split the first and last names so you can address people by their first name if you want to add a personal note.

OK, the characters in Futurama aren’t really my friends, but you get the idea, heh.

Start creating a new file in Word and select the template you wish to use. Word will download any templates you select that you haven’t used before.

The template I selected allows you to print a folding invitation, so part of it is upside down. This feels a bit weird to edit but you can trust that it will come out ok on the printer!

Now go to the “Mailings” ribbon, press “Start Mail Merge”, and choose “Step by step mail merge wizard”

The mail merge side bar will open on step 1 of 6. Choose the type “Letters”, then click the link “Next” at the bottom

Now hit the radio button “Use the current document” and, again, click “Next”.

We want to “Use an existing list”, the list we created earlier in Excel, so browse for the file where you saved it on your machine and select it.

When you have browsed and found your Excel spreadsheet containing the names of your friends, choose the sheet from excel (sheet1), and click OK to load up the names into the Word “Mail Merge Recipients”.

If you look at the screen grab below, this is how Word sees our friends list. We could remove some of them if we don’t want to invite them to our party, by un-checking the box next to their name. Click OK when you are happy with the guest list.

To add a greeting line right before the invitation text, put your cursor above the text, and click “Greeting line” in the panel on the right of the screen.

You can customize the greeting line with various options and you get a preview before you commit yourself.

Before you complete your invites, you need to do some additional text modifications. There is some place holder text you do not want to publish (I don’t know who this “Stephanie” lady is, and it’s not 2004 anymore!). Click Next when you are done.

At this point you will see what the final product will look like. We can browse through the different invitations for each friend. If everything is all right, click “Next” again.

All that is left now is the final step, which is to print all the invitations!

Obviously we used an example that will be applicable to nearly everybody, but the same principle applies to all mail merges, from sales letters to other kinds of invitation.

Do you use Word mail merge? Please share your experiences in the comments …

It is a strange thing when you might regret making and adding friends!

The worst offenders are the stupid farm, mafia, and so on games and applications that spew random irrelevant rubbish into your news feed. When those appear, nuke them!

What if the rubbish is posted by actual friends and not the games they play?

Worry not, it is possible to silence the worst culprits without banishing them from your Facebook altogether. Some people you want to hear everything about, others you are quite content to go check in on them once in a while – this is a good thing and nothing to be ashamed about!

When an offending message appears, mouse over the right hand side and a “Hide” button should show.

Click the hide button that pops up next and you can then hide that person from your news feed.

Next time that person posts a status update you will have to go to their account to see it.

Obviously doing this might be considered “too little, too late” – best is to block people at the source. While you can not predict who out of your friends will turn bad, at least you can only add people who you know, like and trust!

If you change your mind and you find you are missing finding out about your friend’s high scores or most recent virtual flock, you can always go back to the options and allow those “Bejewelled” status updates back into your feed.

I know, crazy, right?

When we all want bigger, better, faster, more, to actually be happy something is running slowly seems … well, just wrong.

And I thought the same, until it happened to me.

Or rather, to my email.

This strange realization happened when I moved my email from an assortment of cobbled together solutions, to (mostly) Gmail. Or rather, Google Apps for domains.

Google has put out a cool software tool that allows you to upload your mail.app email up to a Google Apps email account. I took this as an opportunity to unify my ~10 years worth of email into one online, searchable, central database. Google search is very efficient, plus  the tagging and filters will be a real boon.

One weekend of uploading later and I had my email all ready and waiting at my finger tips. Awesome!

Turns out though there is one flaw I hadn’t considered.

Man, is my mail sloooooooooooow.

I mean, really slow.

Why is this happening? What is the cause? Could be because I am forwarding my chrisg.com email to the apps mail. Could be just that Google is a slow service. Maybe it is because their IMAP implementation is poor. Not sure yet.

What I do know is this whole slow mail situation has had a side benefit that I never expected.

When it takes ten minutes to get an email reply, I am less likely to get involved in email chit-chat, and I get more work done!

Previously I would immediately respond to any email that arrived within seconds, and again and again until the natural end of the email thread. I can’t do that now, the response times have been taken out of my hands. When I alt-tab to another application and alt-tab back there are no new messages waiting for me.

OK, yes, I should shut my email off (and that is probably the real situation), but being an email addict, I will take this solution for now.

Thank you slow email!

Perhaps when productivity systems go bad it needs a new definition, is it still productivity when you get negative results rather than a positive impact?

Either way, I am increasingly seeing people implement systems that are designed to make them more productive, that are putting a distance, poor customer experience, and critical word of mouth between them and their customers.

My first experience of this was when a popular productivity guru asked for my help with the blog he was aiming to set up. I replied a couple of times asking what help this person needed … and got no reply. I felt brushed off so quietly asked a couple of close contacts who were familiar with us both what the game might be.

You know the answer already.

“Oh yeah, he does that. He probably sent a bunch of those emails. And you know he doesn’t respond to most of the email he gets. If he needs you he will be in touch, otherwise forget about it.”

So he asked me for help, but didn’t have the curtesy to acknowledge my reply or even tell me my help was no longer needed.

He saved a couple of minutes from his busy day, I am left with a bad feeling about him and even had discussions with my close contacts about it. Even worse, he does it so much that it has become part of what people expect him to do!

If someone asks me about this person or that person’s products, will I feel inclined to recommend them?

Another case recently was I had signed up for a membership site. In this service the owners personal email is supposedly given out. But when you email it, for any reason, you get the person’s VA. With copy and paste style scripted replies.

Fair enough, use assistants. I applaud that when it gives you more time to give care and attention where it is needed.

But not instead of giving care and attention.

If there is a problem with a credit card, an invoice, you need a password recovery, and so on, those are exactly the type of things you would want to either automate or hand off to an assistant.

But when someone buys your information product and they have questions outside of the “first line support flowchart” then you need to step in with quality responses.

At the same time I joined the aforementioned membership, I also signed up to some courses by a couple of individuals who are hyper productive. If I didn’t know better I would think they were some sort of cyborgs sent from the future, or at the very least taking some serious medication

But you know what? They give you personal attention when it is needed and have systems in place where the personal touch is not required.

Bottom line, what is the point of being productive if it damages your brand? Do not sacrifice long term value for some short term time savings.

Have you experienced anything like this? How do you make sure your productivity benefits you, your business and your customers? Please share in the comments …

This month Cogniview is celebrating the 4th Birthday of PDF2XL – our flagship PDF to Excel conversion product.

It’s not that we always had PDF2XL. You see, Cogniview started as an Enterprise software company that aimed to sell its Enterprise-Level software products to IT departments in large organizations.

We spent a lot of money on flamboyant marketing campaigns, well-dressed sales people and a variety of other time/money wasters.

After 4 years of struggles that resulted in a huge hole in our bank account, we woke up and realized we had to survive. So we turned to our customers who said: Make us a decent PDF to Excel converter – and that was how PDF2XL was born.

Since then, PDF2XL licenses were bought by more than 15,000 companies in a variety of industries all over the globe.

We are thankful to our customers, our employees, our partners and our blog readers who have contributed their time, energy and resources to help Cogniview achieve so many successes.

So, let the party begin!

And what’s a party without party gifts?

First a special Excel Productivity Guide that can help you save even more time when working with Excel.

Click here to Download the Excel Productivity Guide

PLUS…

We would be overjoyed if you would consider leaving PDF2XL a birthday greeting as a comment on this Blog post. The best 10 greetings will entitle their authors with a $15 Amazon Gift Card.

The best part is that the best greeting out of the top 10 will also win a Flip Mino camera!

So, we invite you to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment on this post.

And once again – thank you!

Yoav Ezer, CEO
Cogniview Systems 2002

When creating these instructions you basically have two choices:

1. Use a video screen capture tool to make a walk-through, edit the video down, add voice over, convert to a usable video size and format, upload or send to client.
2. Create a document using screen grabs, annotate with explanatory text, compile into a PDF, send to client or upload

For the first case I use a Mac application called ScreenFlow, while PC users will likely have heard of Camtasia. These work fine for video, where video is warranted and when you have the time and quiet to do this.

The second though becomes a laborious task. It is necessary to do lots of fiddly little activities, and switch between multiple applications.

That is where ScreenSteps comes in. What it does is enable you to be far more productive with the step by step instruction process, either using the built in tools (all the way from capturing images, adding arrows and annotations, through to exporting as PDF), or by integrating with your favorite applications.

You might think that integrating with your existing tools goes counter to what I just said about it removing task switching, but in fact this app does something very cool and forehead-slappingly obvious that I can not believe I did not already have a utility that does it.

What it does is watches your clipboard and any time you add an image to the clipboard it pastes it into the step by step workflow that you are creating. Once you are done you can stop this “recording” and then go through adding instructions and anything else that needs to be clarified. At the end you can export as Word to finish the document editing part, rather than send directly to a finished PDF.

You can even create your own templates to further automate the process.

There is a free trial, after which you need to buy either

• ScreenSteps Standard: $39.95 per user
• ScreenSteps Pro: $79.95 per user

I think it is a bargain considering all the time I will save.

See below for an example that I just exported:

In my opinion, the approach outlined in this video is the cornerstone of productivity (Whether you are an Excel user or not). I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Part I

Part II

As a social media fan I have been getting a lot of use out of social bookmarking tools such as Delicious and even StumbleUpon. This has helped me store away web links, and organize them by tagging, but not the actual content.

For storing actual content that I find I have been using an excellent tool from Iterasi which allows you to “notarize” pages and save them online in folders and tagged for later access as if frozen in carbonite.

Evernote is a tool that aims to do both tasks, but in addition does a whole lot more, including text recognition in images – even hand written notes!

So you can record

• Text notes
• URLs
• Images
• Voice recording
• Grabbed content
• and more

I only heard about Evernote today from @masontech from DidIGetThingsDone, and I am glad I did.

The very best part, and the item that was most compelling to myself, was the fact that it syncs online, desktop and your iPhone. This means you have access to this content archive and all your notes wherever you are, even from your pocket.

So you can grab a piece of content from an ecommerce store or online review using your browser bookmarklet or plugin, and store it on the Evernote website. Later you can pick that note up while shopping on your iPhone. When you get home you can log into your desktop application and organize everything.

Very cool.

It does not end there. You Get Things Done fans can use Evernote to help you with your GTD productivity processes, as shown in this article. Very cool.

For now I am using a free account but will be upgrading to the premium account as it is only $5 a month which upgrades your capacity, speeds up image processing and removes the advertising.

Do you use Evernote or anything like it? Please let me know in the comments …

That sentence in itself is a lesson in productivity. Note I did not say I had made it my mission, or actually made progress. I said “growing desire”. This means it is still largely a dream rather than something I have actually achieved

The truth is I have made some progress, along with my friend Cindy King who has been helping to keep me on track.

My productivity systems are coming together gradually.

Where I made a break through though was to focus on providing “value”, not “work”. Focusing on effort or work got me into trouble where I nearly burned out (more than once). By making sure I put value first, with reward later, I have been much happier and actually created better results for people.

A subtle difference, and maybe being pedantic, but makes a profound difference to the way I approach things

I’ve also discovered it helps to go with what comes natural to you rather than what other folks think you “should” be doing.

Due to some forced offline bouts, speaking engagements and recent trips, I have had a massive email productivity panic and this forced me to sort out my inbox for once and for all. First had to go all the non-essential email lists, either unsubscribed or filtered into folders.

In addition to “nuking the noise” I created two folders called “_action” and “_read” (the underscore puts those at the top of the folder list in my email client).

So now when I check my email I either

1. Delete
2. Mark as spam
3. Move to read – once read they are either deleted or archived in particular folders
4. Move to action – stuff that needs me to do more than read

Those actions are then part of my to-do list for the day, even if the action is that I need to acknowledge receipt.

I am still working on adding rules, for example I have a folder for lists that is for emails from list that are not noisy but still don’t require me to read as they come in.

Of course I have also bought the famous “GTD” book that everyone bangs on about, but I have yet to read it (too disorganized to find time to read the ultimate organization book!).

So now I am ready to learn from you guys, and here we get to the point of the subject line I asked on twitter if you have productivity tips, and I would like to open it up to you too if you have anything to add. Here are the responses so far:

Then we hear that MacSpeech had licensed some of the wonderful Dragon technology and had built a native Mac dictation system from the ground up. This I had to try. My aching wrists and my ever-growing to-do list were begging me.

When I first heard about MacSpeech I thought it sounded like my dream of having Star Trek style computer control. As it turns out, while the system is brilliant, and far more advanced than really we should hope for, it is in fact not quite at the point where you can simply talk to the computer and have it understand your every word.

As you can see though in the video, you can talk pretty fast and have it still follow what you’re saying. The problem I have is having to think about everything consciously, including punctuation, and all that good stuff.

You can see and hear me thinking through this article and dictating it and you can see the MacSpeech reaction to everything that I am saying. Most of the awkwardness is coming from me rather than the system.

[Video may not play in email/feed so click through to view]

When you read the instructions it does tell you that you need to train the system and go through a fair bit of work to get the MacSpeech software to understand what you. In fact, in my experience it is training me that is going to be difficult, not training the software.

On receiving the package I went through the setup procedure and within an hour or less I was tweeting and e-mailing using the software. That’s pretty impressive.

My main difficulty of until now has been learning the keyboard controls and forcing myself to keep my hands off the keys. As it says in the manual you should either dictate or type, not try to do both. That is proving to be very difficult indeed!

Is it more efficient than typing? For me right now possibly not, but that is no fault of the software. It’s more about the amount of time I have dedicated to learning the system and a new approach to creating content. That said, I am certainly going to persist with it because I think it will help both my productivity and RSI.

In conclusion, I think the package is an amazing achievement and is only getting better as they release updates. Already I can see it being extremely beneficial in creating first drafts of content very quickly. I just need to buckle down and RTFM